Sol Calero

Press release

Sol Calero – Archivos Olvidados

For her first exhibition at ChertLüdde, Sol Calero presents a project in tribute to her late grandmother Luisa Hernandez. A pillar of the family, Hernandez (known familially as “Abuli”) lived between her home in Caracas and her farm in Los Llanos, the flatlands of Venezuela, where she became an important member of the community, opening up her house for the local children to learn in classes, decorate the house and participate in social meetings. After raising her six children alone as a widow, she enrolled at the Escuela de Artes Cristóbal Rojas in Caracas and began to study fine art. Calero spent a large part of her childhood taking part in the organic learning process of her grandmother where art and craftsmanship became indivisible from a familial and social structure that allowed for and celebrated the collective aspect of art-making and understanding. The central subject matter of the exhibition is the most recent archive of her grandmother, who collected images from magazines as references for her paintings. These last clippings represent a body of work left unfinished upon Hernandez’s death, picked up and elaborated upon by Calero.

The gallery space presents itself as a trajectory of Calero’s process of approaching the archive, beginning with an intimate room of child-size proportions, where the original images that Abuli used as references for her paintings are displayed. In the same room, Calero has undertaken a drawing exercise taught to her by her grandmother: draw a line, then another one to close it into a shape, and fill the space with color. Covering the entire space with the gestural freedom that children naturally possess, Calero repeats the ritual of her childhood spent drawing with her grandmother. On the paintings in this room, Calero leaves chalk marks on the blackboard canvases as visible remnants of her attempts to draw horses for the first time.